Pinkerton's Sister

Peter Rushforth

ISBN 10: 1931561990 / ISBN 13: 9781931561990

Published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2005

About this Item

New York at the turn of the century; a city bursting with new life. Out near Hudson Heights, Longfellow Park - an area of wealth and position - is being torn apart to make way for the newly rich and ambitious who threaten to engulf the long-standing residents. The new century brings with it a new order. But they still have their traditions, these older families, still have their respectability, their position, their culture. The grander ones even have statues made in their image. Yet, like so many well-orchestrated worlds, their houses contain secrets, rooms, people that they would prefer the rest of the world not to dwell upon. In the Pinkerton household a nineteenth-century embarrassment remains. Alice Pinkerton. Alice Pinkerton is almost thirty-five, not mad exactly, but disturbed, foolish, not right in the head. She had a friend once, a black servant girl (regarded in itself as a harbinger of abnormality) but she disappeared one day, never to return. Alice is tolerated (more or less), free to wander about, free to accompany her family to tea parties and cultured soirees, free to be condescended to, to have looks exchanged over her, free to be treated like a simpleton. But the truth is, Alice's mind is razor sharp, honed by a restless imagination, years of reading, and a profound contempt for her surroundings. Like her namesake in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice Pinkerton too has a mirror through which to enter a different world, only for her the mirror is her books. Left alone to read, to think, she has devoured the world that brings her mind alive: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe are her inspiration; Jane Eyre (and Bertha Rochester), Maggie Tulliver, Lady Macbeth her companions, sustaining and nourishing her lonely life. As she moves through the witless world of Longfellow Park, observing its prejudices, its shallow culture and its vanity, its hatred of truth, she transports those who belittle her into these books and into her own - secretly-written - books, where they can no longer hide behind their tea parties and their song recitals, but are forced to act out their true characters, and reveal their true natures. Solid binding. Please note the image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item.

Seller Inventory # 123679334

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pinkerton's Sister
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931561990
• ISBN 13: 9781931561990
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

In a novel that celebrates the power of fiction and its ultimate redeeming quality, Alice Pinkerton transports those who belittle her into her own secretly written books where they are forced to reveal their true natures, in a novel set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century New York.

Review

Sometimes, a book comes along that demands attention, so considerable is its achievement. Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister has all the earmarks of being such a book, with the twenty-five years it took to write resulting in a novel that his publishers (for once) are fully justified in calling a ‘tour de force’. This is a sprawling, ambitious, richly detailed piece of work that recalls Joyce's Ulysses in its panoramic picture of a whole society, presented through a series of sharply observed mini-portraits (although Rushforth is more immediately accessible than his great predecessor).

Set in turn-of-the-century New York, Rushforth’s subject is the Pinkerton family, still yoked in pre-Twentieth Century ways. Alice Pinkerton is treated with care and indulgence by her family as she is ’special’; somewhere on the fringes (as her family perceives it) of sanity, and taken out to social events but always nervously observed. Alice has her own world, constructed out of the books she loves --and this literary conceit is the engine of Rushforth’s remarkable book. Alice has enriched her mind with the gothic menace of Jane Eyre and the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the wit of Oscar Wilde, the glorious poetry of Shakespeare, the insights of Walt Whitman. With laser-like penetration, she cast a cool eye on the follies of the world around her, her observations honed by the great work of literature that are her inspiration.

Over two decades ago Peter Rushforth published his first book, the much-acclaimed Kindergarten, and that small masterpiece has lacked a companion for many years. The wait was well worthwhile: Pinkerton’s Sister may be an arm-straining volume at 729 pages, but amply rewards the patient reader’s close attention. --Barry Forshaw